I don’t really think Top Gun was meant to be homoerotic either, although it very well could have been. And probably all the “Tom Cruise is gay” rumors helps. When I was 10 or so I had probably watched this movie 50 times, it was my favorite movie and really made me want to be a pilot. Years later when I started hearing some of the gay jokes about the movie, then watched it again, I thought it was really funny and partly true - the acting makes it really easy to make gay jokes about.
Cite?
Well, if you listen to the commentary on the DVD, the technical advisor explained to the producers that the Top Gun school was basically just a few chairs set up in front of a chalkboard in the corner of a hangar. He said the pilots would show up, take class, fly and then get in their cars and go home. The point was that there were no showers or locker rooms at the Top Gun school! There would be no point in having the pilots confronting each other while wearing only towels!
The producers said, “Too bad. We’re getting these guys naked.”
There are a lot of scenes and camera angles in the movie that convince me that the “gay” subtext was very much intentional.
Exactly. Basically, it was a menuever he shouldn’t attempt but the fact that he pulled it off will only encourage him.
As for the “gay” subtext, I’m pretty sure the purpose of filming all those shirtless guys was for benefit of the ladies. But it does look pretty gay.
Side note to Johnny L.A.–It is far from a great movie, but if you’re interested in this stuff, try to locate what I think was a made-for-TV-movie called (I think) “Red Flag: The Ultimate Game.” That’s the Air Force version of Top Gun. It is interesting and a little more down to earth, but hardly “high class cinema.”
Well, in the movie he does wind up with a lover named Charlie.
Probably sour grapes. I wasn’t trying to tear the movie apart. I like F-14s.
And the movie was a hell of a recruitment tool for the U.S. Navy.
I saw Top Gun the summer after my high school graduation. I had a 4-year NROTC scholarship in my back pocket, and dreamed of being a naval aviator. Talk about a motivational shot in the arm!
(Unfortunately, during my entrance physical, I’d also just been informed that I needed eyeglasses. I therefore decided to go into submarines, unless my eyesight miraculously improved in the interim.)
I never saw any homosexual subtext in the movie. Just a lot of swagger.
Top Gun is my favorite gay love story movie of all time, though I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain yet.
I’d read somehwere that Don Simpson had studied gay porn to capture its aesthetic for Top Gun. Not a bad idea, really: if your selling beefcake you’d want to know how the experts do it.
It all kind of went over my head when I saw the move in 1986: I was living on a Navy ship, and showereing with naked of guys meant navigating around in a mob of guys with zits on their shoulders and asses who didn’t bother to flush the toilets. Kind of ruined me for homoeritic subtext.
One thing in Top Gun that did pique me was the bit where Tom Cruise runs out of the office and slaps a tray of coffee out of the hands of the enlisted man. I knew a lot of asshole officers, but even they knew that an officer fitness report is more flamable than an F-14.
Ah Top Gun. Anthony Edwards with hair.
Eh? I don’t think he slapped it out of his hands, he just bumped into him on the way out. At least, that’s how I remember it.
No shit. I had to watch Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Flying Tigers, AND the hopelessly antiquated Dive Bomber before I felt any different.
I don’t think that was even Tom Cruise. Wasn’t this the scene after the tower fly-by, where Tom Skerrit’s CO is chewing him out, then storms out of the office and crashes into the guy with the coffee?